Anna's blends are natural only blends so they wear close to skin, quiet but excitingly complex upon a closer sniff. A Ghost House is a story told with smells: an old mansion, its massive library, squeaky wooden floors and spiral staircases. Wind gets in through a broken panel in the window and flips the pages of a book. The garden is overtaken by briar. On a sunny day A Ghost House smells of everything you might find in a painter’s workshop: paint, tar, wood shavings. On a rainy day, it smells of old wooden cabinets and books that keep them company and … roses.
With notes of vetiver essential oil, Rosa Gallica essential oil, cistus essential oil, patchouli essential oil, ginger lily CO2 extract, frankincense CO2, Bulgarian rose absolute, agarwood essential oil, Choya loban essential oil, cassia absolute and guaiacwood essential oil.
Anna Zworykina A Ghost House Reviews
Fragrantica: An abandoned painter's studio. A Ghost House opens with the smell of paint spilled accidentally after entering an old studio covered densely in dust horizontally and vertically in spiders' webs. I have no idea how Zworykina created a realistic terpenic paint effect with all-natural ingredients, but she hit the nail on the head. I suspect she used very cleverly a sharp incense and vetiver. What comes out next is the smell of a dark musty library. Patchouli seems to be responsible for the dark, earthy and slightly damp aura, whereas labdanum gives it the dusty edge. However, these are just ornaments for the main accord here: a skillfully balanced woody accord of oud+vetiver+guaiac oud. None of this trio overwhelms the other two, and they altogether convincingly paint the central focus of this picture: old cabinets, wooden squeaky floorboards and painting easels filling the space of the studio. This may not sound very appealing as a perfume, but A Ghost House is not a weird, unwearable conceptual fragrance. If you're fond of earthy-woody-resinous scents and are looking for something unusual this one might be right up your alley.
Fragrantica: Fantastic perfume! It smells at once abandoned and lived-in, familiar and absolutely novel, as if you came out into your own garden and found there a wonderful flower you sure didn't plant. Neither very complicated, nor intentionally simple it somehow brings you back everything dear you thought you've lost. In a slow kaleidoscopic movements it shows you first an autumn garden covered in wet brown fallen leaves and then a old pine stump warmed by spring sun; a house in the wood left long ago; a well-kept library of somewhere in Oxford; a family home - visions change each other so smooth you don't even register. It spins, it moves around you, drawing attention, constantly changing angle of aspect, as if holding you inside a fairy circle, stealing a slightest wish to move giving you more instead - your memories alive. There are perfumes for smelling great, there are perfumes that are showy and there is a kind of perfumes that are meant just for you, for your soul. And as often happens, it seems you know some сertain perfume of this very kind inside out, but once in a while it is still able to break your stride and stop you stunned and overwhelmed with some piercing realization of beauty of life. So it happened to me and Anna’s Ghost House.
Luca Turin: I have never been fond of all-natural perfumery, for two reasons: 1- Constraints in art are fruitful only if they channel creativity to give results pleasing to the senses, e.g. rhyme, modal harmony etc. The all-natural constraint is not productive: no all-natural perfume has ever been as good as the best natural-aromachemical ones*. 2- My definition of Nature includes Organic Chemistry and all who sail in her. This said, I find Anna Zworykina‘ fragrances very impressive indeed, and largely immune from the mushiness of most natural perfumery. Wisely, she seems to stick to classical forms and puts her skill into making them work optimally. Verdigris, for example, is a resplendent, stonking chypre. You can clearly smell the superb bergamot, cistus and oakmoss singing in harmony. Young Cossack (in Russia Cossacks have a more positive reputation than abroad) is a lovely animalic hay-tonka accord that would make a wonderful masculine, with or without sabre and horse. Her Cuir de Russie is the most eccentric of that name I remember smelling, very floral and less smoky than the usual fare, with a strange and beautiful sweet-green drydown. In the end, empirical evidence prevails: these are perfumes that even a fan of synthetics like me would love to wear.
